Chapter 3
Tom carried her up the hill.
Ninety pounds of dog, dead weight, her head over his shoulder and her blood going cold through his shirt, and he did not stop once in two hundred yards.
Kindra had the door open before he reached the porch.
"Table," he said. "Clear the table."
She swept it with one arm. Bowls, spoons, the bean cups, all of it onto the floor, and she did not look at what broke.
They laid Shyla on the pine boards and Kindra lit the lamp, shuttered down to one thin blade of yellow across the dog's ruined shoulder.
"Oh, girl," Kindra said softly.
Three furrows, parallel, four inches apart, running from the top of the shoulder down toward the elbow.
Not claws. Claws splay and taper and never run true.
These were even. These were the same depth the whole way.
"That's a rake," Charter said from the doorway. "That's a piece of tin or a garden rake head swung by a man."
"Why would they."
"Because a dog barks and a dog bites, and they wanted her out of the way for the night, and they didn't want to shoot because a shot wakes you up."
The old man came in without asking and put his face close to the wound.
"She got away from him. Look at that. He got one swing and she took it and she went, and then she was too smart to come home while she could still smell him."
Sofie was on the ladder in her nightclothes, both fists against her mouth.
"Kenz," Kindra said, without looking up. "Take your sister up."
"No," Tom said.
Everyone stopped.
"She's six," Kindra said.
"She's six and this is her dog, and if we send her up that ladder she'll spend the whole night imagining it, and what she imagines will be worse than what's on this table." Tom pulled a chair over. "Bug. Come here."
Sofie came down one rung at a time.
"You're going to hold her head," Tom said. "That's your job, and it's the most important one. She's going to hurt in about a minute, and when she hurts I need her looking at you and not at me. Can you do that?"
Sofie nodded. Her chin was going.
"Say it out loud. Out loud means you decided."
"I can do it."
"Good girl."
Kindra put water on. McKenzie fed the stove and got it up hot for the first time in eleven days, and nobody mentioned the smoke, because there are nights when you burn the fire and take the risk.
Kindra clipped the fur back with the good scissors, working out from the edges, a half inch at a time, and the smell that came up off the shoulder was not yet the smell of rot but it was walking that direction.
"Two days," Charter said. "Any longer and we'd be doing something different in this room."
Tom flushed the furrows with cooled boiled water, pouring from six inches up so the fall of it did the work, then went in with a weak salt solution.
McKenzie stood at his elbow and handed him things before he asked.
"Yarrow," Kindra said, and McKenzie already had the bundle down off the joist.
"Pitch salve."
"Here."
They packed the wounds with yarrow and the pine pitch salve Kindra had rendered in August, three parts pitch to one part tallow with a spoon of beeswax, and they did not stitch, because Charter said a dirty wound stitched shut is a wound that kills you from the inside out.
Tom knew he was right. He had read it in a book once. Charter had learned it off a man who died of it.
Shyla screamed when the salt went in.
One sound, high and awful, and her back legs came up and raked the table.
Sofie put her forehead down against the dog's forehead and said, "It's me, it's me, it's me," over and over in a voice that broke Tom directly in half.
The dog stopped fighting.
She lay there shuddering with her eye rolled up white and her nose an inch from the little girl's nose and she let them finish.
They bound it loose with boiled cloth, figure eight over the shoulder and under the chest so it would not slip, and moved her onto the hides by the stove.
She was asleep before they got the blanket over her.
Only then did Tom take the paper out of his coat.
He unfolded it under the lamp with everyone watching.
It was a page torn from a paperback, and on the blank inside of the back cover somebody had written in pencil, in big square capitals, pressing hard enough to tear the paper in two places.
WE KNOW WHAT YOU GOT
WE KNOW WHAT YOU AINT GOT
BE HOME TUESDAY
DONT MAKE US COUNT TWICE
And underneath, smaller, in the same hand:
THE DOG WAS A GIFT. THE NEXT ONE WONT BE.
Nobody spoke.
Oliver said, "What's today?"
"Sunday," Kindra said.
Charter picked the paper up and held it at arm's length and moved his lips as he went down it.
Then he set it back on the table very carefully, the way a man sets down something hot.
"That ain't Prine," he said.
"You said Prine."
"I said Prine because Prine is what I know. But Prine don't write."
Charter's hands had gone still on the tabletop.
"I told you, he can't read but a hundred words, and he sure as hell don't send notes, because a note is a thing that can be found and carried and used against you. Prine's whole way is that nothing exists after he leaves."
"Then who?"
"And there's the other thing." Charter tapped the page without touching the writing. "He wouldn't hurt a working dog. Shoot it if it came at him, sure. But rake it and let it run home wearing a message? There's no profit in that. That's spending something to buy fear, and Prine don't spend."
"Who wrote it," Kindra said.
Charter looked at the note for a long time.
"There's a fella," he said slowly, "that I have been hoping was dead since August."
"Name."
"I'd rather not put it in your house."
"Say his name."
Charter breathed out through his nose.
"Wallace Wingman," he said. "They call him the Butcher. And that ain't a thing somebody hung on him. That's a thing he hung on himself and then did the work to make stick."
"He's Yard?"
"He was under the Warden in the spring. Then he wasn't. Nobody said why and nobody was fool enough to ask."
Charter's pale eyes came up. "If he's running his own crew now, then there's two things in that valley instead of one, and the one that writes notes is a considerable sight worse than the one that counts your cellar."
"Why?"
"Because Prine wants your food," Charter said. "Wingman wants your food and he wants you to know he took it."
The lamp ticked.
"Tuesday," Kindra said.
"Tuesday," Tom said.
"That's two days."
"That's two days."
Sofie was still sitting on the floor with the dog's head in her lap and she had not let go once.
Monday came in gray and hard with a wind out of the north that had teeth in it.
Tom was up at four and had a list by five, and it was longer than two days.
"We can't do all of it," Kindra said, looking at where he'd scratched it into the fire ash on the hearth stone.
"I know."
"So pick."
He picked.
"The gap goes," he said.
Charter, chewing cold elk by the door, stopped chewing.
"Say again?"
"The funnel. The nice easy gap in the hedge with eleven noisemakers pointed at it."
Tom rubbed his face. "That was built for men who don't know we built it. Whoever came Saturday night walked this ground for an hour and he saw all of it. So it's not a funnel anymore. It's a sign that says the family that lives here is clever and is waiting for you right over there."
"Then what."
"Then we close it. All the way. Thorn brush wall the whole hundred and eighty feet, no gap anywhere, and we make the whole thing ugly and equal."
"That's a day of work."
"That's a day of work."
"And then he comes in somewhere you ain't looking."
"Then he comes in somewhere I'm not looking, but he comes in slow, and he comes in noisy, and I get to hear him instead of getting to watch him." Tom stood. "I'd trade knowing where for knowing when. Every time."
Charter chewed a while.
"That's the right trade," he said. "I'd not have made it. But that's the right trade."
They worked the hedge from six in the morning to four in the afternoon and every one of them bled for it.
Wild rose is the worst plant in the mountains to handle, and there is no way to do it kindly.
They dragged it in by the armload on a travois Tom lashed out of two lodgepole poles, and they wove it into the existing mat, and then they wove dead fir into the rose, and then they laid whole fir tops butt outward so the sharpened ends of broken branches faced the river.
McKenzie worked in Tom's old leather gloves that went past her elbows and did not complain once.
Oliver dragged. That was all he did for ten hours, back and forth, up from the cottonwoods with brush over his shoulder, and by noon his shirt was stuck to his back in the freezing wind and by two he had stopped talking entirely.
Sofie stayed with the dog.
That was the assignment Kindra gave her, and it was a real one, because Shyla had to be kept from chewing the wrap and had to be got up on her feet twice a day so her lungs would not fill.
At noon Sofie came out to the hedge line and reported, formally, that Shyla had drunk water and stood for a count of thirty.
"That's good news," Tom said. "That's the best news I've had in a week."
"She stood for thirty," Sofie repeated, so it would count.
"I heard you, bug. Thirty."
By four the river side of the Thorn property was a hundred and eighty feet of unbroken thorn and dead spruce, chest high and eleven feet deep in places, and a man could get through it with a machete in about twenty minutes of loud work.
There was no way through it quietly at all.
Tom stood back and looked at it and knew it was not enough and also knew it was what they had.
"Now the noisemakers," he said.
They pulled Oliver's eleven lines out of the dead gap and redistributed them, and this time the boy set them himself with no help and no suggestions.
"Why there?" Tom asked, at one.
"Because if he can't walk through the brush he has to walk around the brush, and around the brush is the gravel bar, and the gravel bar is only nine feet wide at the upstream end."
"Good."
"And here's the other thing." Oliver pointed along the bank. "I put two of them out past where I think he'll come."
"Why?"